SUBJECT: Residential Customers Rate Seattle City Light Among the Best Utilities

SEATTLE – Satisfaction increased over the past year among Seattle City Light’s residential customers, who rated City Light as one of the best midsize utilities in the West, according to J. D. Power and Associates.

“Providing excellent customer service is the goal of everything we do at Seattle City Light,” General
Manager Jorge Carrasco said. “Each of our 1,800 employees contributes to these improvements and we’ll never stop working to make our customers’ experience even better.”

The study, now in its 16th year, measures customer satisfaction with electric utility companies by examining six factors: power quality and reliability; price; billing and payment; corporate citizenship; communications; and customer service.

Some examples of the service considerations customers are asked to rate are “actions to take care of environment,” “avoid lengthy outages” and “ease of navigating their utility’s website.”

Among the study’s highlights:
• Seattle City Light was rated highest for the total monthly cost of service, which reflects the low cost of City Light’s electricity and utility conservation programs that help customers use less energy.
• Increasing customer satisfaction with utility communications accounted for 2.9 points of the higher score.
• And corporate citizenship saw a similar improvement at 2.5 points.

Initiatives to improve customer service even more are already underway as part of City Light’s recently approved Strategic Plan update. The six-year plan calls for website enhancements, customer service center upgrades, advanced metering and continuation of a program to replace older underground power lines to increase reliability of service.

In 2013, City Light was rated highest in customer satisfaction among western midsize utilities by business customers.

Seattle City Light is the 10th largest public electric utility in the United States. It has some of the lowest cost customer rates of any urban utility, providing reliable, renewable and environmentally responsible power to about 750,000 Seattle area residents. City Light has been greenhouse gas neutral since 2005, the first electric utility in the nation to achieve that distinction.